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Tech billionaire pays $10,000 to get himself whacked. Reason? So he can upload his brain.

Howard Is

Howard Is

Lucky Mud
Nowhere Man said:
You know little has changed in the insatiable quest for immortality since the ancient days.

Personally I would think it would suck.
Click to expand...

I doubt there would be any it to suck.

Oh, you mean immortality per se ?
At first I thought you meant being uploaded would suck.

Immortality ? Nothing would change. We experience one moment.
I remember a tiny fraction of the experiences which constitute my life.
Would it be any different if I had never been born ?
 
Howard Is

Howard Is

Lucky Mud
Heyo said:
The Daily Fail ...

Nectome seems to exist but they aren't going to upload someone soon:

After Break with MIT, Nectome Clarifies It Has No Immediate Plans to Upload Brains | Live Science
Click to expand...

We have no idea of what should be uploaded, how it would be obtained, or what relation that would have to the living being undergoing whatever the process may be.

We also know that the brain is way more complex than the simplistic neuronal model of common conversation. There are so many layers to it, and no explanations so far about how it all functions as life and consciousness.

Even if the whole state of a hundred billion neurones, more or less the same number of glial cells, the internal state of each synapse, could be instantaneously recorded, what do you have ?

Data. And only data describing the brain.


Meanwhile, what happened to the sense of personhood associated with that brain ?

Gone. Even before the process of ‘mapping’ or whatever began.

To me, this has always seemed the most preposterous pseudoscientific notion to gain traction in the public mind.

The irony is that a lot of the proponents of this consider themselves scientific atheists, yet they are believing in a Flying Spaghetti Theory in the hope of eternal salvation.
 
Shadow Wolf

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
Howard Is said:
We have no idea of what should be uploaded, how it would be obtained, or what relation that would have to the living being undergoing whatever the process may be.

We also know that the brain is way more complex than the simplistic neuronal model of common conversation. There are so many layers to it, and no explanations so far about how it all functions as life and consciousness.

Even if the whole state of a hundred billion neurones, more or less the same number of glial cells, the internal state of each synapse, could be instantaneously recorded, what do you have ?

Data. And only data describing the brain.


Meanwhile, what happened to the sense of personhood associated with that brain ?

Gone. Even before the process of ‘mapping’ or whatever began.

To me, this has always seemed the most preposterous pseudoscientific notion to gain traction in the public mind.

The irony is that a lot of the proponents of this consider themselves scientific atheists, yet they are believing in a Flying Spaghetti Theory in the hope of eternal salvation.
Click to expand...
Yup. And, ultimately even if they could make a clone to upload the brain data into, it's not really actually you but only something that thinks it's you. It was lights out for you. It's lights out. But when it was lights out for you, it was lights on for someone else. Like that Schwarzenegger movie Sixth Day.
 
Augustus

Augustus

…
There's an interesting book that looks at this kind of thing:

The Singularity is expected as a consequence of technologies that until recently could not be imagined. But the change Kurzweil imagines resulting is not new. It is not essentially different from Gorky’s fantasy of humans evolving to become pure thought, or Tsiolkovsky’s dream of deathless space voyagers. The virtual afterlife is a high-tech variant of the Spiritualist Summerland, while accelerated evolution in cyber-space is an updated version of Myers’ Victorian dream of progress in the after-world.

Overall, the Singularity is best understood as a version of process theology. Just as the Bolshevik God-builders imagined a deified humanity, so a number of twentieth-century theologians, mostly American, imagined God emerging from within the human world. Rather than an eternal reality, God was seen as the end-point of evolution. In this version of theism it is not God that creates humans. Rather, humans are God in the making.

Process theology is one more philosophy of progress – an attempt to solve the problem of evil by positing its disappearance over time. Since God is not fully actualized in the world, evil cannot be eradicated in one all-encompassing transformation; but evil can be gradually overcome, as God comes more fully into being. Meliorism – the belief that human life can be gradually improved – is usually seen as a secular world-view. But the idea of progress originated in religion, in the view of history as a story of redemption from evil. Philosophies of progress are secular religions of salvation in time, and so, too, is the Singularity.
As Kurzweil writes it, the history of the universe is divided up into epochs of increasing self-awareness. In the coming epoch, which is imminent, ‘the universe will become sublimely intelligent’. Human consciousness will become cosmic consciousness.

This is the occultist world-view of Myers and Lunacharsky, derived from Theosophy and ultimately from ancient Gnosticism, restated in the materialist terms of twenty-first century computer theory.”

John Gray: The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death





The Immortalization Commission by John Gray – review


"A kind of secular mystery cult," Gray writes, "God-building was another part of the late 19th-century European current in which occultism and science marched hand in hand. The God-builders believed a true revolutionary must aim to deify humanity, an enterprise that includes the abolition of death."

The notion that many among the earliest dialectical materialists believed firmly in the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of such transcendental developments will raise the eyebrows of many a reader. By the time they come to this discovery, however, their eyebrows are likely to be already hovering just under their hairlines, for through his researches John Gray has laid bare an astonishing seam of thanatological fantasising and psychical conspiracy running from late-Victorian English high society through the Russian revolution and the Stalinist terror to the computer age neo-spiritualism of today. The Immortalization Commission is a sober account of a hitherto almost unnoticed but remarkably widespread phenomenon – and also a romp of a read. Thank God, or Whomever, that Gray got there before Dan Brown, though Brown is probably at this minute sharpening his pen, or firing up his laptop.

Gray begins his narrative in England in the late Victorian period, with the Arnoldian sea of faith rapidly ebbing and the mighty ones of the land in search of some, of any, continuing certainty among the remaining rock-pools. In a scene straight out of George Eliot we find Charles Darwin attending a séance at the house of his brother Erasmus, along with the anthropologist Francis Galton, FWH Myers, the inventor of the word "telepathy" and Eliot herself, though she deplored spiritualism. Nor did Darwin think much of the occasion, finding it "hot and tiring" and leaving early.

Myers, the true believer among that evening's gathering, later went on to found, with the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the Society for Psychical Research, which would boast among its presidents William James and Henri Bergson, and attract figures such as Tennyson, Gladstone, the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Sir William Barrett, and Arthur Balfour, the "last grandee", as his biographer called him, one of the richest men in Britain, whose repressive policies as chief secretary for Ireland earned him the nickname Bloody Balfour. Balfour's account of humankind's post-Darwinian predicament is plangent and heartfelt: "Man . . . is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir to all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory accident in the life of the meanest of the planets." Out of this appalling realisation on the part of Balfour and so many of his circle sprang the new and pathetic faith in spiritualism.


The Immortalization Commission by John Gray – review
 
Heyo

Heyo

Veteran Member
Howard Is said:
We have no idea of what should be uploaded, how it would be obtained, or what relation that would have to the living being undergoing whatever the process may be.

We also know that the brain is way more complex than the simplistic neuronal model of common conversation. There are so many layers to it, and no explanations so far about how it all functions as life and consciousness.

Even if the whole state of a hundred billion neurones, more or less the same number of glial cells, the internal state of each synapse, could be instantaneously recorded, what do you have ?

Data. And only data describing the brain.


Meanwhile, what happened to the sense of personhood associated with that brain ?

Gone. Even before the process of ‘mapping’ or whatever began.

To me, this has always seemed the most preposterous pseudoscientific notion to gain traction in the public mind.

The irony is that a lot of the proponents of this consider themselves scientific atheists, yet they are believing in a Flying Spaghetti Theory in the hope of eternal salvation.
Click to expand...
I don't think that mind uploading is impossible or that it wouldn't be I that is in the computer. I see the mind as a function of the body and just like a program can be run on different computers, a "person" is not bound to the wetware.
But I agree that a functioning brain is much more than the structure. Each neuron has an activation potential that can't be derived from the structure and is also dependent on the chemistry of the brain. Neurotransmitters and hormones have a huge influence. And then there is our "second brain", the neurones in our guts. We don't yet know if we simply can omit those and still get a functioning "person".
Mapping the structure of the brain is fundamental research and decades away from any application.
 
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